A Nurturing Ecosystem for Creativity in LIS

India as a country is a complex economy; non predictable. Right now our organizations and govt. do not want to invest in great ideas because there are lots of other areas available to make money, even they can build some flats and sell it for better profit. Tomorrow when all this gimmicks will get over, it will be a changed ground, I don’t know when in India but it will, then they will value quality efforts, and as like, western countries our organizations also will go behind ideas and its development to a beautiful product to make money and exist. At that time our officials also think about; idea and its genesis, and the lack of ‘Silicon valley, Cambridge and Boston’ like ecosystems to nurture Indian talents and their idea.

Creativity can be nurtured at individual levels, and it walks with your approaches towards a work. Take the case of how you are searching or dealing a problem, until today you might have used monotonous methods to solve it, but today onwards try alternative methods, that is methods entirely/partly different from previously followed ones. See the results and identify the advantages and disadvantages and go on with another approach. Take these thoughts to your bed, sometimes when you are on bed, but not sleeping, sometimes while at bath,…etc these sort of new creative ideas will pop up, but mostly it will be when you are in a relaxed state of mind. Here I am not talking about inventing any smart material or swam robotics, it may be about some coding in your program or any design aspect for your brochure or it can be how you see your work.

An efficient, timely environment is not considered a breeding ground for ideas, but it should not be lazy. There should be diversity not only in thoughts but also in gender, age, qualification…etc. Because creativity is neither related to higher education, nor to any experience; it may come at times to some people and will vanish in a blink. You cannot calculate a time for its arrival, but you can create some environment for its nurturing. It is always better to have a collaborative effort to yield a better idea, because at its birth it is like a newborn baby, beautiful only to its parents. Criticism in its correct amount will enable any bad idea to become invaluable. These valuable criticisms in a collaborative environments will becomes the nurturing ground for a brilliant idea. So when you got an idea always make it to questions to defend or support your ideas to make it relevant to others at the nascent stage. These questions will enable it to overcome or reach out the other 80% of its journey to a beautiful product. It can be another CC, MARC,UNICODE, or even an another WhatsApp. But in its way it needs your (Parent) nurturing through patience and perseverance.

Tremendous developments are happening all over the world, in the field of communication devices we can see that in the forms of tablets and smart phones. Up to some levels it penetrated to the spaces created for traditional PCs. PCs are clueless about comfort and easiness these devices shaped for its users through various sizes and apps. As an outcome organizations forced to enable a change or opted a viable solution called BYOD:’ Bring Your Own Devices’. To work with change we LIS professionals need to bring in more sophisticated approaches like ‘Bring Your Own Concepts’ to stay creative and innovative in a service sector like ours.

Data intelligence and Insightful information

For the last few years, I think we are continuously mastering different ways of storing and retrieving information using various DL, IR and some web 2.0 tools. To a great level it enabled us to provide the information our organization and staff demanded, yes, but what if, if they ask for some quick, accurate and insightful information about future trends from the data we stored? Are we capable to analyse the Big Data, by considering the developments in future? Added to that the velocity and variety and ultimately the size to which these unprecedented data is growing is going to make our work and responsibilities multi dimensional. Even I am causing it by writing my thoughts through this multi-dimensional, asynchronous and multi-channel platforms and you are adding it up by dropping your replies. In such cases organizations will turn towards data scientists or information experts like us with the expectation to solve their problems related with Big Data, and prescribe for them, it requires data analysis and interpretation. Sometimes we need to create infographics by considering the different audience in picture. Are we evolving through such ecosystems in LIS field today? If not why ? Is it not relevant for us?

Given the openness in various bigdata  softwares and technologies it will not cost more, instead it will carve some time from our scheduled life. New challenges push us for new techniques, technologies like in-memory computing will add agility to our data analysis for better predictions from the Big Data scenario. Right technologies, right processes, right insights and all the above right man management; all matters here. Creative solutions are the need of the hour to shape our own future and stay competitive in future. The advent of Internet of Things (IoT) underlines the need, it will not be a far cry to say that the information products themselves would suit its users better each time they tries to confront the problem. In that situation how we are going to make ourselves relevant there?

For a better future.

Subeesh A C

Pune.

Ref: PCQUEST, NCL